Memory Is Fiction

The other day someone asked me if I had a copy of an email, and before I could respond someone else chimed in, “oh, he’s got it…he saves everything.” Personally, I’m surprised I’m in the minority in this — in fact I often worry about all the stuff that I’m not saving.

Part of the reaction I get is along the lines of “why bother?” The answer is simple — your brain is lying to you. Most of us have intuitions that we are able to accurately remember the past in great detail. My wife and I can have a disagreement about some event that had 10 years ago, and my memory of the event is rock solid. She is just misremembering it.

Except the times I’ve gone back to verify that, my memory is only right about half the time, and often my memory of an event is wildly off on what really happened. And that’s not something peculiar to my memory, but rather a hallmark of how our brains work.

As Jonah Lehrer (from whom I swiped the title of this post) notes , the upshot of research into the fallibility of memory is that the more we remember something the less likely we are to remember it accurately.

After all, we like to think of our memories as being immutable impressions, somehow separate from the act of remembering them. But they aren’t. A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes. The larger moral of the experiment is that memory is a ceaseless process, not a repository of inert information. It shows us that every time we remember anything, the neuronal structure of the memory is delicately transformed, or reconsolidated.

So when it comes to memory, distrust and verify is the best approach. Fortunately, we have the tools now not only to easily preserve everything, but also to quickly search through that record when it becomes necessary to determine what really happened that one time when…

Caffeine Reverses Memory Problems — In Mice

Researchers at the University of South Florida studying Alzheimer-like symptoms in mice found that a daily dose of 500mg of caffeine reversed the memory problems the mice experienced. After two months on 500mg of caffeine a day, the memory-impaired mice performed as well on memory tests as normal mice.

However, in other experiments with normal mice, the researchers found that caffeine did not improve the memories of normal mice. According to USF researcher Gary Arendash,

This suggest that caffeine will not increase memory performance above normal levels. Rather, it appears to benefit those destined to develop Alzheimer’s disease.

Are We Out Of Our Minds (Or Our Minds Out of Us?)

Probably not many people’s idea of good relaxing reading, but Jerry Fodor takes on the Extended Mind Thesis in a review of Andy Clark’s Supersizing the Mind.

To oversimplify it a bit, the extended mind thesis claims that technology literally extends our minds outside of our bodies such as, for example, when we’re using a smart phone. Quoting Fodor quoting David Chalmers’ foreword to Supersizing the Mind,

I bought an iPhone. The iPhone has already taken over some of the central functions of my brain  . . . The iPhone is part of my mind alrady . . . [Clark’s] marvellous book . . . defends the thesis that, in at least some of these cases the world is not serving as a mere instrument for the mind. Rather, the relevant parts of the world may have become parts of my mind. My iPhone is not my tool, or at least it is not wholly my tool. Parts of it have become parts of me . . .  When parts of the environment are coupled to the brain in the right way, they become parts of the mind.

I won’t go into more detail as Fodor does an excellent job of explaining the thesis and some criticisms of it, except to note that along with technology other people would seem to also be part of the extended mind imagined by Clark and Chalmers.

For example, there is a whole class of things that rather than my smart phone I consult my wife about. Restaurant food, for example. My wife can remember exactly what I want to eat at many food establishments, whereas I don’t consider it worth my time to commit this to memory and so will interrogate the waiters about this and that food choice.

Frequently, it is just easier for me to turn to my wife and ask her what I should order since she is able to much more quickly access what it is I would like at a given place than I would. Under Clark and Chalmers formulation it would seem my wife is part of my extended mind. I haven’t read enough to know what their view on other people as part of the extended mind is, but it certainly would be an odd result if they affirm this.